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| Joe and I meeting new baby Peter Andrew Nitkiewicz |
Bolivia is still constantly on my mind. I'm constantly thinking and dreaming of the kids. I find myself at a loss of what to write. Pen and paper do not seem to do my thoughts and feelings justice. So much of my experience went untold. It is impossible to truly convey the eleven months I spent in Bolivia; really you need to have been there, to understand. But I shall do my best.
Coming home was hard. People changed while I was gone, and I changed too. I became a lot more vocal and outspoken about things I might have kept to myself before. After living next to 30 teen and pre-teen girls for a year, with only half a window separating my room from theirs, in a noisy Bolivian town, life in Ypsilanti felt far too quiet. I found trouble adjusting to a more comfortable lifestyle. Everything seemed too nice after life in a third world country. Buildings, roads, etc. felt too spaced out; there were too few people on the streets. Body space was a thing now.
I no longer had to fight anything; the internet worked, the hot water in the shower worked every time and I was in no danger of being shocked by it. I could see Joe every day. Instead of handwashing every article of clothing I owned, and hanging it to dry on the hogar roof, I could just toss it in the washer and dryer. Food was plentiful. I could choose my own dinner. The first month I lived off of bagels, cheese, eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, and noodles. It was heavenly at the time, though it may seem kind of pathetic now.
When I came home from Bolivia, I was on antibiotics fighting a parasite, an amoeba, salmonella and a bunch of bacteria. My head was full of lice. It took poor Joe four lice shampoos and painstaking sessions of picking nits out of my head with a lice comb (he'd never tied a hair tie in his life), spread out over six weeks, all done in secret while my host family was gone, before I could be pronounced lice free.
My stomach had shrunk. I had a hard time finishing a yogurt. Food seemed too plasticky and processed. Anything fried turned my stomach.
I found myself , in the span of a few short weeks, going from caring twenty-four seven for over a hundred orphans who had been sent over from other orphanages because they were supposedly so bad they couldn't handle them, to caring for a quarter of that amount, all white and priviliged kids. It was a complete paradigm shift.
People had choices over what they wanted for dinner. They had several types of meat and other types of food in their refrigerators, at any given point. They had so much food that they threw it out if nobody wanted it. It was too much.
I felt guilty, eating. I felt like I was betraying my children, letting them down. How could I eat, when I knew that they were hungry? In the hogar, breakfast was typically a piece of bread the size of your fist, two if you were lucky. They were usually stale, sometimes even moldy. Often we got a baggie of expired cookies from the school lunch program for breakfast or dinner. Sometimes dinner was a cup of corn, which we ate with our fingers. When we got meat, it was hardly what one might call meat or even edible. It might be the thin sinew between two chunks of spinal cord, the leftovers normal people wouldn't eat. There was usually bones in our food. I saw the meat once, sitting in the wheelbarrow outside the kitchen waiting to be cooked. It was going bad, you could smell it. Even cooking and seasoning it did little to mask the smell. I couldn't eat it.
Lunch was the main meal of the day. Some days, people were generous and we had enough. Other days, food was scarce. I used to hate the days where we had nothing but a bowl of soup for lunch. One week, all we had for lunch was a bowl of soup. All week long. That week was torturous. Even the little cups of Toddy we had at breakfast with our bread, there wasn't enough for a full cup. My temper was so short. The kids cried because they were hungry. It was so hard to take care of them properly, I didn't have the energy.
I got to the point where one ladleful of lentils, spread out on my plate, grossed me out because it looked like too much food. There were days I would eat sugar straight out of the jar, I was so hungry. I would hallucinate food. One day there wasn't enough bread at my table for each of us to have a full piece, so I broke the bread into pieces so we could each have 3/4 of a piece. Lunch that day was a small bowl of watery vegetable soup, no meat. I laid on the chapel floor, face down, and cried, begged Jesus to send food to my kids. It was a prayer I prayed often.
People would post pictures of their food on Facebook, ask whether they should choose this food or that food for dinner. I resented them. How could they? Where did they ever get the idea that food was something so trivial?
When I had been home for a few months or so, I sat in Sunday mass with Joe and his family. The readings were about the abundance of the Lord, about a banquet table, abundant food. I couldn't take it. All I could think of was my kids, about how they were not eating, about how they were not experiencing the "abundance of the Lord". The pain was overwhelming. I couldn't stop crying, couldn't pray.
I had a dream the other night, in which I met other people like me who were interested in the hogar and in helping to provide better nutrition for the kids. How I wish it were reality.
I've been home now for 6 months. My godson, Franz, and his older sister Belen have finally been adopted by a German family. I have a new goddaughter from the sponsorship program, one who was one of my babies in Santa Maria. There are three new SLMs at the hogar, doing the jobs done by Natalie, Aisling and I, as well as two other volunteers from Germany. My kids are happy and growing; their Christmas newsletter pictures are hanging on my fridge. I can eat now. My stomach is back to its normal size; my head is lice free. I can go to a Spanish mass without bursting into tears, and my fiance has not had to plead with me to eat for a while.
But the dreams persist. The feelings and the memories are still there, even in the midst of going about my normal everyday life. I find myself watching documentaries of life in other countries, of issues affecting women and children internationally, in an effort to keep in touch with life as I've known it.
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| Shirley, my goddaughter now |
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| Franz and I on the day of his baptism; he had already soiled his baptismal garments :) |
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| Yhajaira, my goddaughter, on the day of her First Communion with her older sister Mayra and her younger sister Ofelia |
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| Belen, Franz's older sister |
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| Joe with Melani, his goddaughter who has since been adopted by her aunt in Argentina |
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| Natalie, my wonderful site partner and fellow SLM, poses with Tatiana and "Flat Stanley" |
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| Joe holds Melani and Shirley during his visit |
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| Aisling, our co-volunteer from BOVA, hugs Tere during her despedida (good-bye party) |
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| "Flat Stanley" poses on one of the Comedor tables - this was a typical breakfast or dinner |
